The Name of All Things (A Chorus of Dragons, 2)

Spectacular! An improvement upon The Ruin of Kings in storytelling and writing craft. The Name of All Things picks up the story only two days after the events of The Ruin of Kings. We meet up with Khirin in a tavern searching for the Black Knight, but he comes across Janel and Brother Qown, they catch him up to speed about events that transpired in a timeline that mirrors The Ruin of Kings. Jenn Lyons fine tuned her ambitious storytelling mechanic to be easier to follow. The Name of All Things also heavily expanded on the lore and world building in a big way. This series is ambitious and this sequel makes it even more so. I can already tell this series is going to live in my head and heart for a long time and I have only barely scratched the surface.

It took me a little while, but I’m glad I picked up this series again! I had read the first book awhile ago before the series was completed and now I’m back continuing with the books after being the type of person who glanced at the ending of the entire series to know I’ll be satisfied with the ending overall before committing to the entire thing. I need an ending I’ll be satisfied with if I’m diving back to roughly 25 hour long audiobooks each for a 5 book series, you know? The worst thing would be to spend all that time immersed into a series only to be let down at the end. That's the romance reader in me talking. While this book kind of feels like it has a second book slump, it was still action-packed enough where I was equally confused yet entertained enough to keep reading! I read this in audio and I should note the narrators changed for this book, but for good reason! I thought the original narrators had gotten replaced and was baffled for ages since the audiobook had been announced, but it’s because this book is told by a whole different cast of characters, even though our main character is still very prominently in this story. So, it does make sense. This story takes place not only 2 days after the events at the end of book one, but also proceeds to introduce us to characters who recaps the same 4-5 years Kihrin went through in book one. ***This review will spoil the events that happened in book 1. Just a warning.*** I should note that Jenn Lyons is very helpful and provides an excellent recap of the previous book’s events at the start of this book. So, if you’re not reading these books back-to-back, or even maybe if you are and need the grander details broken down because you might've been confused (like I was), the recaps are a great help and much appreciated. The way these recaps are done are quite fun because it’s blended into the storytelling of this book and not just a dry recap of events. Content notes include transmisia, misogyny, mentions of grooming (religion), threat of sexual assault and rape, mentions of child rape, murders/death, graphic violence, skinning, eye gouging, slavery, mentions of war, and mentions of the aftereffects of war and poisonous gases that is something akin to nuclear atom/radiation poisoning. We start this book following Kihrin and Star very shortly after the events of book one, after Kihrin has destroyed the cornerstone called the Stone of Shackles and Tyentso has become Emperor of Quur. Kihrin also carries the sword called Urthaenriel, which is also known as Godslayer. Star is a Joratese man Kihrin “bought” in the first book and then was put in charge of Darzin D’Mon’s (Kihrin’s brother) fireblood. Firebloods aren’t really horses per se, but bigger and better. The Joratese people LOVE their firebloods, and their entire culture is around horses and firebloods? More on that later. Kihrin and Star get redirected from their initial destination and arrive at a tavern instead. Where they meet Janel and Brother Qown. Janel is someone Kihrin has met before. She is the woman of his dreams, or nightmares depending on how you see it, that the demon Xaltorath put into his mind. When they met once before, it was in a sort of afterlife where demons roam and Janel goes every night when she sleeps. But Kihrin does not remember that meeting between them, while Janel does. The important thing here is that they finally meet properly in the living world and Janel needs his help. While Kihrin thought the Old Man, also known as Sharanakal and a dragon, was hard to get rid of, now Janel needs help with some other dragons. Morios is presumably on the way to attack the capital city of Jorat called Atrine. And then there’s Aeyan’arric who has been all over Jorat attacking the towns and has now chased them to the tavern and iced them in. This is where the characters remain for a majority of the book. While Janel and Qown are awaiting for a second person to arrive, they tell a story trading back and forth their adventures in the time that overlaps Kihrin’s in the first book that covers about 4 to 5 years. So, this book mirrors somewhat the storytelling in the first book where the characters are in the present and two characters share stories of what they went through leading up to this point. These parts are told by Janel and Qown to Kihrin in alternating chapters. Meanwhile, we sadly no longer have Thurvishar and his snarky comments narrating the footnotes of the story here, but we have a new narrator documenting this story who is called Senera. At the beginning of all this, she does remark that she is documenting these stories for her boss, Relos Var. And Relos Var is an extremely powerful wizard who had tried very, very hard to buy Kihrin on the auction block before ultimately losing the auction to the members of the Black Brotherhood. That is the gist of this whole book. We learn about a whole new cast of characters, so in a sense the story does seem like a bit of a drag because it feels like we’re not getting anywhere since we’re just going back to the same time period we read in the first book, except this time with new people. Senera is not as entertaining in her footnotes as Thurvishar and while I don’t necessarily hate her character, we also don’t know much about her here either. Can she be trusted? Who can say. I’m not the biggest fan of books that take place with characters seemingly telling their life story TO someone at an inn or tavern. It’s a commonly reused fantasy trope as of late (did it start in earnest due to the success of Patrick Rothfuss’s books?) and I don’t care for it. I'm sure it started before then, but it's become popular and seems overused. The saving grace is that Janel and Qown’s stories are so entertaining and I was working overtime trying to untangle the family linages and past lives for all these different characters and just what was going on, that it was only slightly less annoying they were stuck in one place for so much of the book. We meet characters like Ninavas and Dorna, who I really came to like. We also find out a bit more about Star and who he is, which is fun. But who we really learn most about Janel, and it's a doozy. I think Janel was hard to like at first, but I really warmed up to her the more the book went on. Learning how she's connected in the story to Kihrin (and even Teraeth) was a lot of fun. And on that note, we don't actually see Teraeth that much in this book. In the "present day" a lot of the story really only takes place the day or day after the events of the first book, so while Teraeth is handling something else, we mostly only see Kihrin with Janel at that point. I don't know if this is a spoiler, but I knew from the first book the author had said this was going to have a polyam relationship and it's much more evident in this book that the relationship is going to be between Kirhin, Teraeth, and Janel. But the only real mystery is HOW do they all come together? I fear the author is committed to the slow burn (I like slow burn romances and this series is a high fantasy first and foremost, so it's going to take awhile to build). I think the character of Relos Var is very interesting. We do find out more about WHY he's so fixated on Kihrin, and things start to make sense. I vaguely remember this series had been promoted as some "villain origin story" but that never really made sense because the main character in all of this is Kihrin and he's NICE. It's one of those moments where you wonder if you've been lulled into a false sense of calm where you accidentally wind up siding with the wrong character, but I think it only makes sense in hindsight that this is a villain origin story? Because even if not from Kihrin's point-of-view, it's clear Relos Var is a bad man. The way he treats Qown in this book is the greatest indicator that maybe he's been the bad guy this entire time. I feel bad for Qown because he is an anxious young man who only wants to do good and Relos Var had taken him under his wing as a father figure of sorts, and what he does to Qown is the ultimate betrayal. What Qown winds up surprising everyone with at the end of this book...I was shocked at first, but looking back, I don't blame him. Sidenote, we should discuss how a certain someone being the head of the Vishai faith (which is the religious order Qown is part of). Learning that he set up a faith that worships S'arric, his brother, is so weird. Like, WHY. What was the point of all that? I hope we find out at some point, because I definitely don't understand. I think my one biggest issue with the plot in this book is the whole build up to Janel and a certain suit of armor, and then it just don't really go anywhere? The armor took so much time and secrecy to acquire, and then the first chance she gets, Janel winds up taking it off. I am so baffled by these events. That's really the only issue I had with the plot. The author introduces something called the Turning of Leaves in this book and how the Joratese people view gender. It's interesting how the Jenn Lyons manages to include transgender people into her fantasy series. Janel is genderqueer, I believe? She uses the pronouns she/her, and identifies as a stallion. This is where the Joratese language differs from what Kihrin knows from what he's been taught in Quur. Janel's body is female, but her gender is a stallion. This is how she tries to describe how genders work in Jorat to Kihrin. If someone in Jorat is not a stallion, then they are a mare. In that sense, it does feel gender is binary because they establish their social order based on the concept of stallions and mares. But there is still the inclusion of a character they address with they/them pronouns (albeit said character IS a demon), so maybe the rep is iffy? Janel explains the stallions and mares concept pretty early on in this book (at 6% based on what my e-book says), so everyone is on the same page as well as they could be from the start. The Turning of Leaves is a ritual, or blessing from their god, where the Joratese people will be able to change their body to match their gender. I really can't speak for the rep in this book, but I did want to note that all this exists in the world of this series, and to take from it what you will. The audiobook is okay. I think the three narrators did a fairly good job carrying forward the voices of characters from book 1 (Kihrin and Teraeth) into this book, and the voices they used for characters between the different narrations were pretty good. I would say only the voice for Star stood out the most because it sounded so off from what it remembered from listening to the first book but he doesn’t have a very major part in the books (or not yet from what I’ve read), so it’s not a BIG big deal. Maybe the name Janel was pronounced different in the first book as well, but again, not a big deal since she only showed up briefly in book 1. But I think the audiobook production and narration was overall superior in the first book and someone dropped the ball at parts for this one (I’m guessing for a big publishing house like Macmillan there SHOULD be someone who would oversee these things but I’m not sure). I’m that annoying reader who was listening to the audiobook and following along with the e-book, and some things stood out to me (I verified with my e-ARC and UK hardcover copies that these are not issues with the text and definitely with the audiobook only). There are times Lauren Fortgang as Senera reading the footnotes would wind up reading the page numbers the footnotes appear on and it’s so WEIRD. Like, why did she do that and why did no one catch it during editing for the audiobook? Read “page 161” out loud in chapter 12. Also read page 252 with a footnote, chapter 44 in the first footnote, and then footnote 9 in chapter 47. Did no one do quality checks?? There was also a weird audiobook booboo where lines overlapped on the audio so it sounded like multiple characters were taking at the same time. This happened when Janel was talking about splitting their people between the 8 gates and into 9 groups. Another very odd instance is at the very end where you have a sort of end credits for the audiobook and with Lauren Fortgang narrating the ending parts of this book, she read the end credits but doesn’t mention the other two audiobook narrators at all. It was just her mentioning herself and the audiobook director by name. It was very odd they didn’t give credit where credit was due in this audiobook because the other two narrators in my opinion, Saskia and Dan, did a much better job on their parts in the audio with no noticeable errors. Unfortunately, Saskia Maarleveld and Dan Bittner only narrate this book out of the series and don't return for the others, so we can only hope that Lauren reads the right things (or an editor catches any mistakes) in the other books because she also co-narrates books 4 and 5. There's a LOT more I could say about this book, but the overall feeling is that I still enjoyed this book, even if not as much as the first book just from the storytelling point of view. Because this very much felt like book 1 was split into two parts, and this was part 2, rather than a sequel. The audiobook errors were the most distracting thing about this story. I wish the audiobooks had the "extras" available in the physical books and e-books available - like the family trees, the maps, glossary, etc. Those were a HUGE help to figure out who was who and learning what was going on. I guess that's really the major downside of the audiobooks when the publisher doesn't include the really helpful reference guides.

Much like the first book this one takes some time to read through but it is an excellent story. The story telling style with footnotes and all is both confusing at times, amazing all the time and eternally entertaining as it is like sitting through a movie with friends and getting the fun commentary on the side. Be prepared to dedicate some time to this book though as the convolutions of story take some mental effort to keep straight but this is another impressive addition and Jenn Lyons pulls it off with style and fortitude. An epic tale and epic storyteller. I look forward to the next entry in this series.

If you loved the first book, you'll be smitten with the second one as well. The author is not an easy read, casual escape reading this is not. But if you're looking for satisfying world building, fun framing and storytelling that's outside of the normal prose, and a meaty plot - this is your series! And YES, if you're looking for excellent queer/genderfluid representation, this is a great book to pick up!

I've read a lot. A lot. A lot. Anyway, this is some of the best fantasy. In line with the Wheel of Time series. Complicated plot. Definitely read the footnotes during rather than after. They generally add to and in some cases important information to the story. They also add humor.

This is book 2 of chorus of dragons do not attempt to read this without reading book one I did read book one and I have a fairly good memory when it comes to remembering plots and story points ext and I was still completely lost for the first 60 pages or so. Like the first book this is set in a high fantasy world where 12 royal families function like quasi corporations under the emperor, an ancient prophecy about a hell warrior is starting to come to fruition and a ancient evil is on the verge of waking up. The first book followed Khirin a bastard son of the royal house D’Mon and former slave and the reincarnation of an important figure, this book follows janel a count of Jorat a horse obsessed kingdom and the only survivor of the biggest hellmarch, when a group of demons gather together and summon a Demon prince, in recent memory. Janel is a likeable protagonist who shares POV with qown a monk and mage the dialogue is snappy the supporting cast is interesting I considered book one a dark fantasy and while this is still gritty and violent it’s also a bit lighter in tone maybe because Janel while having plenty of her own trauma isn’t a slave and has a driving urge to protect and help. Again like the first book this all sounds very standard where it differs is the complexity you have races that were once immortal that are not you have 8 gods and 8 dragons and 8 cornerstones except we find the numbers that don’t always match we have god kings and queens that may or may not be dead and who aren’t actually gods but are more then wizards, and demons whatever they actually are added to reincarnation, and the prohised hell warrior is at least 4 people not one we have factions and plans in place wedded to a narrative structure that while I found much easier to follow then the first book a lot less messy there’s still multiple POV and two different timelines and footnotes that work better then the last because they serve both as a source of humour and as a hint of the opposition view point indeed the book does a great job of upping the stakes, making the sides less clear cut while taking the grimness down a notch though as side it’s still gritty by any stretch. While this isn’t a casual read demands too much in the way of attention it’s a lot of fun and a superior follow up to a strong first book.

I like reading fiction books

Discovering Jenn Lyons' work has been my favourite part of 2020. Her fantasy is deliciously complicated and the backstory and histories are so deep, but never in an unnecessary way, and the plot twists and schemes are absolute mastery. It's intense. I've been starved for intricate world building and it is here for me. This book centres on Janel, instead of Kihrin. It has the same set up as last time though, except this time Janel finds Kihrin in a tavern in Jorrat, and she catches him up on what she's been doing these last 4 years. It's set 3 days after the disaster at the capital, aka, three days since the last book ended. Kihrin has the magical murder sword. He knows Janel from the visions. But he doesn't know her. And neither do we, so we get to. And the the chapters are broken up between Janel and Qown. Janel is just INCREDIBLE and I'm half in love with her. Qown is honestly a soft idiot so naturally I adored him too. I also thoroughly adored the queer rep: Janel is genderqueer -- uses she/her pronouns but she is a man. Gender/sex are not the same. I loved that the world was so comfortable with this that it's normal; Janel gets confused that Kihrin doesn't understand. When they talk about some of the trans characters, Janel is just, "Oh how do you do it in your country then?" And Kihrin is like "?? we don't." (Fool world.) It's just so inclusive and it's this is so refreshingly wondrous in an epic fantasy. The plot is twisty, backstabbing, carefully articulate genius. It's long, and sometimes not fast paced, but it sets the building blocks for the finale that knocked me over. This series is just phenomenal. It's lush and vast and diverse inclusive, and utterly badass.

Zustand und Buch Schulnote 1

The ruin of kings was a 3 star book set in a 5 star world. There was just too many lurching leaps and weird character transitions to keep up with. This book is the result of the learning that went into making that first book. Bravo